Apparently, you can roll into a family restaurant in northern Kentucky and walk out with a Secretariat.

We often go to ridiculous lengths to get you the story, and I do stress ridiculous. For this month’s eight-way mini-ute comparo, your editors found themselves in Maysville, Kentucky, 70 miles northeast of Lexington, where the currency is bourbon, horses, basketball, and Clooneys, who are the indigenous celebrities. We needed the first two—a horse farm for the equine-themed story’s opening shot, and bourbon because it makes life worth living. But first we needed lunch.

We stopped at a very smart-looking establishment on U.S. 68 named deSha’s and tucked in. The executive chef, Randy Cooper, approached and, sensing a northerly disturb­ance in his restaurant’s energy field, asked what brought us in. “We’re from Car and Driver,” barked Dan Winter, our former assist­ant art director and resolute comparo-mate, “and we need a horse.”

That is when it started to get weird. Apparently, you can roll into a family restaurant in northern Kentucky and walk out with Secretariat. Ordering up a filly down there was no harder than ordering lunch. Okay, bad analogy. I leaned over to another comparo stalwart, Lotus engineer George Riehl, and asked, “Am I having an auditory hallucination, or did he just say he’d get us a horse?”

Cooper called up Duff Giffen, the city’s director of tourism, who came by just as we were settling our bill. Fun, vivacious, and well turned out, she said, “I have a couple of horse farms in mind, but there’s one just up the road that I want you to see first.” That’s service!

The farm, owned by Doug and Kate Hendrickson, sits serenely behind a couple of new-home developments. Reached at the end of a long, tree-lined driveway, the 400-acre farm comprises a series of large corrals hemmed in by the kind of brown wooden fences you see in Kentucky tourism one-pagers.

Five horses were standing at the far end of one corral, but they trotted over to get fed as soon as they achieved radar lock. We obliged with some Funyuns and breath mints. (Just kidding, Mr. Hendrickson.) Giffen said, “These horses are ridden by kids in the neighborhood. Tennessee walkers, appaloosas, one paint, and one thoroughbred—they’re all friendly.” We asked her where we could get some apples and carrots, and she wrinkled her nose and produced them. (A trip to the store also may have been involved, but we were too busy trying to start the old Ford tractors on the property, hoping to do a little farm-implement jousting.)

We opened up the large central corral and parked the eight vehicles in an art-directed arrangement. Photographer Marc Urbano and creative director Darin Johnson set up their cameras right where the fencing formed a short, square bottleneck.

The horses approached the parked utes cautiously but with a high level of curiosity, as if to ask, So these are the things that replaced us? One was morbidly flatulent and milled about in the bottleneck behind the camera. Another took a whiff of the CR-V’s hood and bolted away in the opposite direction. We whipped out the apples and carrots. The horses began encroaching like zombies.

One gelding took our feed and then moved on to the Mitsubishi’s side-view mirror, gnawing away robotically. Another, his appetite whetted by the canapés, started foraging at the hood of the RAV4 with his teeth, scratching down to the primer. All began relieving themselves in symphonic rondo.

Slowly, and without us quite realizing it, these sheetmetal snackers had pushed us back into the corner of the fence. They began traipsing in front of us, nudging us with their bulk and peppering us with belches and farts and sounds so unnatural I thought they had come from the tractors.

Urbano leapt up onto the fence behind him, claiming to need a higher vantage point but clearly propelled skyward by a mixture of professionalism and good old-fashioned freakout.

Like I said, it got weird. But it was a providential weirdness. Need I mention we got the shot?